CALGARY -- He was a father willing to drive his teenage son nearly 500 km to rodeo school, and prepared to watch from the sidelines as his boy did battle with bucking broncos.

Wayne Steiger was clearly there for his 16-year-old Ben, though what he had to do next is something no parent ever imagines.

The chute opened, and Ben went where thousands of prairie kids have gone before: he failed to hang on, and the saddle bronc chucked the Turner Valley, Alta., teen face-first to the ground -- but instead of simply being winded and maybe a little embarrassed, Ben somehow ended up under the horse's hooves.

The injured teen stood up, managed a few steps, and then collapsed.

Wayne Steiger was there within seconds, the veterinarian running from the stands to his son, in a desperate race to save his life.

"It was in the arena and his dad was right there and was with him the whole time -- he was doing mouth-to-mouth, and there was a sports therapist doing chest compressions, and they had a defibrillator," said Sherri Morrison.

"Everybody did every single thing that could possibly humanly be done."

It wasn't enough.

Ben Forrest Steiger ended up dying on the arena floor, fatally kicked by the horse he was learning to ride.

Morrison is a fixture at the John Duffy Bucking School, where her son-in-law Skeeter Thurston is an instructor and her own grandkids are students, and she's seen endless spills as kids learn the finer points of staying where the saddle should sit.

She was there Saturday night at the Haymaker Center in Thorsby, Alta., when a typical training ride in front of a crowd of about 100 people went tragically wrong.

Morrison says Ben's spill didn't look serious at first, and in a sport where success is measured by not falling off, it's expected that most of the learning takes place when your jeans hit the dirt.

"I've seen wrecks that look 10 times worse where the kid gets up and runs back to the chute," said Morrison.

Like everyone else in Alberta's rodeo community, Morrison is stunned by a fatality in a sport that appears dangerous, but where death is incredibly rare.

Staff at the arena, near Edmonton, have repeatedly reviewed video of the ride, and it seems to have been a sheer fluke of timing.

"We've looked and looked at the video and it really looks like the horse tried to avoid him -- I mean, a horse never wants to hurt you -- but it just kicked him in the back," said Morrison.

To rural kids in places like Alberta and Saskatchewan, rodeo is common -- it's another extracurricular option, on top of the hockey and soccer-type sports pursued by youth in cities, and many kids start off busting sheep and the like before moving up to bigger animals like saddle bronc.

Attending a rodeo class like the John Duffy Bucking School shows Ben was taking his riding seriously, and probably hoped to go further in the sport.

Morrison said Ben was certainly in high spirts before the fateful ride.

"Ben was so excited, he was happy, he was standing on the back of the chute joking and laughing," said Morrison.

"He was so pumped to do this."

Morrison requested that RCMP from Leduc send victims services officers to the school Sunday morning, where they spoke to young students who witnessed the accident.

Those students, many of whom counted Ben as a close friend, are planning to have stickers printed in Ben's memory.

"They plan to wear them for the rest of the season," said Morrison.

Ben's family, when contacted, asked for privacy -- but friends of the Oilfields High School student were expressing their grief over social media.

"The world lost an amazing man today, a kind soul taken too young. Rest in peace my dear friend, you will never be forgotten!" wrote his friend Alissa, on her Facebook page.